Thursday, May 03, 2007

Exhibitions

Yesterday I stopped by the special exhibit of Spiderman comic books at the NYPL. They were displaying about 10 issues from the 1960s, including one from 1968 where Spidey grapples with students demonstrating on campus.

Then I met a teacher and a friend at the Met. We checked out the Jewish ossuary in the new Greek and Roman gallery. The rooms are nice and bright, but not particularly mindblowing. They had some Roman wall-paintings, though, which were cool.

We also visited an exhibit about Venice and the Islamic world. One of the things I found fascinating was an edition of the Koran, printed in Arabic in Venice in the 16th century. I guess the printers figured that they could do as well with Muslims as they were doing with Jews. But apparently it didn't catch on.

And we talked some more about this. About the open ark, with the Torah scrolls peeking out, and the curvy shofar, and the plate with fish at the bottom. Last week I read up for the class about the Sardis synagogue. By the way, I am pretty sure there is a ligature in one of the Hebrew inscriptions from Sardis, which was not identified correctly in the publication.